Does it make sense that you can be sent to jail or sentenced to pay debilitating fines for sharing a file for no financial motivation, that did not even impact the commercial interests of the artist or the copyright holder?
Talking about jail time for copyright is a serious change of tone that if true must be met with a very serious response.
As such, I want to make sure we understand exactly what we're talking about, and I'd like a careful response to this. The EFF has already been criticized for over reacting to copyright, so I'd like to ask some questions to clarify the situation and to distinguish the potential from the current. The reason I want to make this distinction is because many of us are comfortable with this broken system. It's both corrupt and incompetent, so breaking the law is quite easy. A serious threat of jail time especially to individuals would be a turn in its competence. That would be quite a serious thing to suggest.
Does the TPP make it a federal initiative to pursue copyright violations? Currently all copyright claims are civil, so while the poor have no copyright protection companies risk their reputation suing in mass. This is why the torrent networks still run. A company can attack schools and universities, but not individuals -- unless they want to trash their PR department.
My next question is do you think the weak exceptions and limitations, you mentioned here, will actually change anything? You may have noticed I'm a bit of a pragmatist: I don't care about the law per-se, I care about what's going to happen. Does this change U.S. law? Do think any changes made will actually hit the individual? I don't care about trade sanctions, I'm digital: try and stop me.
Here you said the TPP might extend copyright another 20years in non-U.S. countries. Do you have a convincing argument to tell me that matters? Copyrights not like patents. Patents (at least with respect to length of time covered) seem to actually work. At the point when you're 50 years out from anything publicly useful, who cares? Another 20 years? Yeah sure have it. Most people who use this find a work around before the 50 years is up anyway. As I'm sure the EFF people know, this actually defeats the point of a copyright system in the first place: The goal is to build on each other no to build a whole new thing.
So tell me why I should care? What does this change?